Positive Park: Security & Resilience

In planning Positive Park, security has always been a top priority. Unlike many datacentres, we will staff the facility 24 hours a day. In addition, we have hired specialist security teams to patrol the site with dogs. We monitor and restrict with barriers all vehicular traffic to the property. We have installed sophisticated intrusion detection on the datafloor and beyond, where any alarm alerts the local police directly. A full accesscontrol system via an isolating portal ensures that only authorised personnel can enter. Naturally, we monitor the whole datacentre and its environs with movement-sensitive CCTV.

Positive Park resilience

We have designed Positive Park using the optimum individual components available. That said, even the best component can fail, so we have made sure that the failure of one component will never compromise service to the datacentre as a whole. We have tolerated no "single point of failure", and have considered every contingency. Should we lose mains power, a bank of batteries in our UPS takes over whilst our diesel generators kick in. We have contracts with a number of local fuel providers to top up the generators while they run, which allows us to maintain uninterrupted power to the facility indefinitely.

We have a number of fire detection and extinguishing systems. To start, localised VESDA units distributed throughout the site sample the air for smoke or fumes.

These units are significantly more sensitive than the sort of smoke-detector one might find in a domestic environment. If they detect the smallest particle of smoke, they alert the datacentre staff immediately, and give them a precise location to investigate. The staff can then take any appropriate action in the early stages, including isolating the source and using manual extinguishing techniques.

After the first alert, smoke and heat detectors set off further alarms and, when necessary, rapidly deploy a high-pressure inert gas within the datacentre, highly effective at extinguishing any fire, but without the issues associated with water or powder extinguishers in a server environment.

Positive Park's networking infrastructure is, in every component, at least “doubled up”. This means that the failure of a networking switch, router or fibreoptic cable should make no difference to the network's performance. Some organisations who claim to provide this level of resilience do not, upon close inspection, come to scratch. This is because their datacentres have evolved, ad hoc, over time; compromises and inconsistencies have crept in. We have had the luxury of a decade's worth of experience to ensure that from day one, our datacentre has been designed from the ground up with resilience at its foundation.